1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of mobile computing, in particular to managing relationships between entities using a mobile computing device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile computing devices are becoming increasingly more powerful and functional devices. Many mobile devices are multifunction devices with multiple device roles, such as personal digital assistant (PDA), smart phone, cellular phone, portable media player, voice recorder, video recorder, global positioning system (GPS), camera and electronic file storage. This increased functionality has resulted in mobile computing devices being used to manage appointments, tasks, contacts and other aspects of a user's life. Because of the portability of mobile computing devices, they allow users to rapidly modify and access information from various locations.
While conventional information management techniques on a mobile computing device allow users to maintain a contact database, a calendar, a task list and other types of personalized data, these conventional information management techniques often require use of disparate applications to maintain different types of data. This requires users to navigate between various applications to review contacts, determining outstanding tasks or receive notifications about pending appointments. Additionally, conventional information management techniques do not allow users to monitor and record relationships between various types of entities, such as individuals, businesses and events.
While personal information management software (PIM) allows users to maintain an address book, calendar and task list, PIM software requires users to manually record data in separate applications. For example, a calendar application is used to maintain a schedule while a separate address book is used to maintain contact information. This compartmentalized storage of data makes it difficult for users to generate and/or observe relationships between different types of entities. While enterprise customer relationship management software (CRM) provides users with limited features to maintain contacts and events, the CRM software merely allows users to monitor a limited set of relationships between entities within a business context, such as sales analysis, customer support or marketing.
Although users can access social networking websites from mobile communication devices and use the social networking websites to share information with other users and/or form communities with other users, social networking websites only permit certain types of relationships between entities. In particular, for a user to generate a relationship with another user via a social network, both users must agree to the generation of the relationship. For example, if a first user wants to establish a relationship with a second user, the second user must authorize or approve the relationship before it is generated. Hence, social networking websites only allow generation and maintenance of “symmetric relationships,” where both entities involved expressly agree to the relationship. As relationships between entities are typically subjective and can be characterized differently by each entity in the relationship, social networking websites only allow users the ability to maintain certain types of relationships.
From the above, there is a lack of a system or method for managing user-defined relationships between disparate entities on a mobile computing device.